There has been a lot of rumor going around that there will be a decoding station from DirecTV that will plug into the USB port of a home computer.
Below is a flyer for DirecTV HDPC-20.
The unit itself is a two tuner DirecTV box that can connect to your computer and act as two independent tuner cards. It will be a first for a Satellite company to allow digital broadcasts to be saved to a hard drive that is not a proprietary hardware. Microsoft and DirecTV are right now doing Beta tests with the unit.
There are some problems with Windows Media Center only being able to play MPEG2 format videos from this box. DirecTV's new High Definition channels are all being broadcast in an MPEG4 format, so Microsoft has to integrate this into Media Center.
Full scale production and release will have to wait until the MPEG4 codec is ready for Windows Media Center.
The TV world is waiting for this piece of technology to hit the streets to unleash the full power of Windows Media Center and DirecTV.
